Changing the Face of Farming: Update #1

Changing the Face of Farming is over halfway to our goal – after just 10 days of fundraising! The level of support for my research – and for permaculture research – means a tremendous amount to me. Thank you so much, to everyone who has donated and helped spread the word.

I thought I’d share a brief update to let you know how things are going with the development of the project.

Over 100 farms so far have responded to a preliminary survey.

This means we already have a course snapshot of the scale of production on permaculture farms, and the beginning of a sense of how permaculture is influencing farm planning. At this preliminary step, we’ve already increased our understanding of permaculture farms, and generated solid data that was never available before. Very exciting! (I’ll be blogging about this soon, so stay tuned for more analysis.)

Over 70 farms so far, from all over the country, have said they want to participate in the project.

This is fantastic, because it means we’ll have a large and diverse pool of farms to work with, and thereby a more diverse and meaningful sample. The larger the pool of potential sites we have to select the ~50 farms, the greater our ability to identify patterns in farm size and scale of production, and visit several farms at each level, in multiple ecoregions.

If you are interested in seeing this research project meet its goals for incorporating the full sample of 50 farms, there is a critical contribution you can make – regardless of whether you can donate cash: help spread the word.

Think of people who should hear about this project. Pick a target: 3, 10, 20 people. Phone or email them directly. Tell them why you donated to the project, and why you think it’s important. Feel free to give these folks my e-mail address as well as the link to the project page (http://rkthb.co/11800).

Share a link to the project (http://rkthb.co/11800)on whatever social networks you are part of: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and email lists. Tell your networks why you donated, and why you think it’s important.

If you can think of fund-raising opportunities that I should look into, let me know.